Today's consumer is inundated with advertising. In fact, advertising is so ubiquitous it is often times ignored. What is more, many people lack the belief that companies tell the truth in advertisements. As a result, word of mouth marketing and advertising has become increasingly important with respect to the sales of certain products. Word of mouth refers to the passing of information, especially recommendations, but also general information. In the context of advertising and marketing, the use of word of mouth may mean passing information between consumers or other entities, including manufacturers, experts, retailers, etc. to convey aspects or merits of a product or service, or the experience one person has related to that product or service, or related products or services.
The emergence of the importance of word of mouth marketing and advertising has coincided with the use of the Internet for researching, shopping and purchasing of products. Thus, online marketing and advertising has also become increasingly important. The use of word of mouth marketing in an online setting may therefore be an effective method for such online advertising, as consumer recommendations allow word of mouth advertising to be disseminated either online or offline.
In fact, according to a 2007 global Nielsen survey, consumer recommendations are the most credible form of advertising, as cited by 78% of the study's respondents. When businesses enable customers, or other types of users, to write reviews, ask or answer questions from the community, or share experiences, they create content that become powerful forms of marketing, and in particular, as discussed above, word of mouth marketing.
This view has been widely reinforced by many retailers (retailers will be used herein to refer to any type of seller of a product or service, for example both online and brick and mortar) who report that products with relatively more reviews sell better and are returned less often. Thus, user generated content (comprising any information such as text, audio, video, or other information carrying medium generated by a user who is a consumer (of goods, a product, website, service, purchaser of the product, etc.)) may be extremely important to manufacturers, retailers or other sellers of a product or service (collectively referred to herein as a product) as user generated content may allow products to be differentiated and sales of products increased.
As this user generated content may include such things as user reviews, user stories, ratings, comments, problems, issues, question/answers, or other type of content which, for example, a user is allowed to compose or submit through any medium, there may be many methods and locations (for example, online or offline) where a user may be allowed to generate content and the user content generated may be provided in a wide variety of mediums or formats the distribution of this user generated content may be difficult. In fact, in many cases user generated content may be more effectively generated or gathered at one location and more effectively utilized at a different location. Thus, the effective collection and distribution of user generated content may be important to both manufacturers and retailers of products, as utilization of such user generated content may increase sales of these products.
As such, in many cases, retailers or manufacturers may provide customers the ability to produce such user generated content. These retailers or manufacturers may, however, produce or sell a wide variety of products. As a consequence it may be difficult to build up a critical mass of user generated content (enough to effect purchasing or other consumer decisions) with respect to any particular one product.
Every day, consumers are faced with frustrating barriers to purchasing. They get close to making a purchase decision, but are hindered by critical questions they need answered to feel like they are making an informed and confident purchase. Unfortunately, with the velocity of today's consumer marketplace, product marketing, product documentation, customer support, and channel marketing frequently fall short of consumer needs and expectations. A July 2008 study by Retail Systems Research underscores the insufficiency—52% of respondents cited that the number one challenge facing retailers today is keeping product information and availability up to date. The cost of not keeping product information up to date is diminished customer loyalty and trust, increased call center volume, missed opportunity for conversion, and, ultimately, long-term damage to the brand.
To remedy this deficiency, to encourage users to generate content, retailers and manufacturers may conduct marketing campaigns or may encourage user generation of content through direct emails. While these methodologies may result in the generation of content they may have a high degree of overhead and do not result in sustained generation of user content. Additionally, these methods may only be suited to encouraging the generation of particular types of content.
As the presence of this user generated content may drive sales, it is therefore desired to actively promote the generation of such content.